After 5: Required Reading

Now, after three years of working with Ozarks Literacy Council, Schurke, who was diagnosed with dyslexia in grade school, can read at an eighth-grade level. She is proud that she’s read more than 100 books with the help of volunteer tutor Jan Naegler, an accountant with JE Talbert, CPA.

“Kind of like the little choo-choo train,” Schurke says of her determined progress in gaining literacy with Naegler’s help. The two meet weekly for a little more than an hour.

Schurke’s reading problems aren’t isolated, according to Ozarks Literacy Council, 430 South Ave., Ste. 200. The nonprofit organization estimates that more than 40,000 adults in Greene County can’t read well enough to decipher even a food label, children’s books or job applications.

“To me, reading is a window to the world,” says Naegler, who has volunteered as a tutor for seven years.

Ozarks Literacy Council Executive Director Paula Shumaker estimates that 70 percent of her 200 volunteers are businesspeople.

Five years of tutoring for Teresa Blair, senior vice president at Guaranty Bank, has led her into the role of Ozarks Literacy Council board president.

Blair says teaching literacy improves both individuals and society. In support of that perspective, the literacy council estimates that workers with poor reading skills cost Missouri employers about $4 billion annually in operating inefficiencies.

Still, Blair says, fighting illiteracy isn’t the most popular charitable cause around.

“The difficult part of being involved with the literacy council, and on the fund-raising side, is that a lot of people don’t see it as a critical need, because it’s not a crisis nursery, and it’s not about family violence,” she says. “But you know what, it’s at the root of a lot of those issues. It permeates everything.”

The council, established in 1968, primarily serves Greene County, but it’s even struggling to keep up with demand in that confined area, Shumaker says. Ozarks Literacy Council has on file about 30 adults waiting to be matched with a tutor.

“We’re peddling as fast as we can,” Shumaker says. “The need is so great.”

Ozarks Literacy Council has three staff members and an annual budget of $140,000 to meet the needs of 200 adults and 7,000 kids who receive instruction through one-on-one and group reading sessions.

The literacy council gets a quarter of its funds from United Way. Its biggest fund-raising events are Pizza Bowl in the winter and Trivia Night in the summer.

Case Studies

Ozarks Literacy Council Executive Director Paula Shumaker says illiterate adults were usually overlooked as children, suffering from an unstable family or an undiagnosed medical condition, such as poor eyesight.

The reasons adults seek help at the literacy council vary. Shumaker speaks about a 62-year-old woodworker who couldn’t fill out job applications after he was laid off, a woman who accidentally overdosed her child because she couldn’t read a medicine label and a man who simply wanted to read books to his newborn son.

The consistent theme with most clients is the desire to improve their lives, a mark of resiliency, Shumaker says.

“A lot of them have developed their creativity and memorization,” she says. “There’s a lot of people that you see every week that you would never guess that they can’t read very well.”